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Hessons from tfje iLtfe of JLtucoln 



AN ADDRESS 

DELIVERED IN THE 

CITY OF NEW YORK ON FEBRUARY 12, 1909, 

ON INVITATION OF THE BOARD OF 

EDUCATION 



BY 
ISAAC FRANKLIN RUSSELL, LL.D. 

Professor of Law in New York University 



'1^ 






Herons from tfje life of Lincoln 

Tf INCOLN has passed into history. His apoth- 
>^ eosis has been accomplished. He is num- 
bered among the immortals. He is one of the few 
among the sons of earth on whose name the poppy 
of oblivion can never scatter its dust. His true 
place is not only in the Hall of Fame, built to com- 
memorate the glory of his countrymen, but high up 
in the Pantheon of Humanity. Let me paraphrase 
the language of another: "It matters very little 
what particular spot may have been the birthplace 
of such a man as Lincoln. No people can claim 
him, no country can appropriate him; the boon of 
Providence to the human race, his fame is eternity, 
his residence creation." This was the language of 
Sir Charles Phillips and was spoken of Washing- 
ton. Phillips is not with us to-night and I use his 
words to express my own tribute to Lincoln. 

Gladstone once said that if he were taken into 
some grand gallery where heroic figures of the 
world's great men, soldiers, statesmen, patriots, and 
philanthropists stood on lofty pedestals, and lo there 
was one pedestal loftier by far than any other in 
the collection and no statue yet stood thereon, and 
he were asked, out of all the long list of the world's 
great and greatest, to name the man whose figure, 



more colossal than any other, should adorn that 
highest place, he would not hesitate one moment to 
name the man George Washington. This may be 
true and just. Here, at least, at the Lincoln Cen- 
tenary Celebration we'll never tear the purple from 
his shoulder. 

Lincoln believed in the plain people and was one 
of them. He was no doctrinarian or dreamer, but 
an adroit politician and consistent spoilsman. A 
man from Chicago once called at the White House 
and asked the President to appoint him postmaster. 
Lincoln could not, he felt, remove the officer then 
in service; but, wishing to do what he could, he 
looked over a list of vacant places then before him, 
and, finding one which carried the same salary as 
the postmastership, boldly wrote down the appli- 
cant's name, and then looked further and noticed 
that the place was that of Secretary of Legation at 
the Court of St. James's. This appointment was 
unexpected and unsolicited, and eventually proved 
very annoying to Mr. Charles Francis Adams, our 
Minister, who found the appointee wholly ignorant 
of international law. 

Lincoln introduced into his cabinet his most pow- 
erful rivals for the Presidential nomination; and 
later appointed Chase to be head of the Supreme 
Court in order to remove him as a factor in the can- 
vass for the chief magistracy. 

Lincoln was not nominated as an unknown man 
— what we now call a "dark horse." He had served 
in Congress, and had twice been a candidate for 

2 



the United States Senatorship in Illinois. He 
made a strong bid for the Presidential nomination 
and had stumped the Eastern States before the 
national convention in the interest of his candidacy, 
and had secured wide recognition as one of the 
ablest orators in the land. 

He believed in himself and eagerly sought the 
highest office. Napoleon no more desperately fol- 
lowed the star of his destiny, than Lincoln believed 
in his own divine call to the service of his country 
in a task which he reckoned to be greater than 
Washington's and which we now recognize as such. 

He was powerless to control events; but events 
controlled him, and he felt that he was an instru- 
ment in the hands of God in one of the greatest 
revolutions in human history. He lived among 
epoch-making scenes, where justice was receiving a 
new definition, written by the sword; and liberty, 
freedom and equality were being expounded not 
only in the Senate and the forum, but on the field 
of arms. In the presence of slavery the Declaration 
of Independence had become a lie, and our states- 
men a band of hypocrites. It cost blood and treas- 
ure for four long years for us to prove our faith in 
the eternal principles which our fathers professed 
in 1776. 

Poetry, eloquence, and art will proclaim Lincoln 
as the great emancipator of four million slaves. As 
such he will always be remembered. But, in truth, 
he never was an abolitionist of the type of Wendell 
Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. His para- 



mount object was to save the Union and be a faith- 
ful exponent of the popular will. 

The constitutionality of the Emancipation Proc- 
lamation was bitterly disputed. It was justified 
as a war measure. Lincoln at one time doubted its 
usefulness. It could have no operation save in those 
sections which were held by the enemy in armed 
rebellion. It had no effect in the border States and 
elsewhere in loyal territory where the Union arms 
were triumphant. By its very terms its application 
was restricted to localities where its enforcement 
was impossible. Lincoln had compared the procla- 
mation to the "Pope's Bull against the Comet." 

He told the story of a boy who was asked how 
many legs a dog had, calling a tail a leg. The boy 
promptly answered, "Five," only to be rebuked by 
the warning that calling a tail a leg did not make 
it a leg. 

It is not true, as we often hear, that Lincoln con- 
sulted with no member of his cabinet about this 
Proclamation. He stated seriously that he had 
promised God he would issue it. Nor is it wholly 
in Lincoln's own words. Chase had urged that 
there should be some reference to Deity in such a 
document, likely to have high historic rank, and at 
the request of the President penned the concluding 
words: "And upon this act, sincerely believed to 
be an act of justice warranted by the Constitution 
upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate 
judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of 
Almighty God." 



Lincoln felt that traditional views of the Consti- 
tution should not hinder the work which he had 
been called upon to do and finish, namely, to pre- 
serve the Union and extirpate slavery. A constitu- 
tional amendment abolishing slavery was needed, 
and Lincoln secured its adoption by the requisite 
vote of three-quarters of the States. The conven- 
tions which ratified the war amendments were tur- 
bulent and disorderly, and some of them were no 
more representative bodies than was the Rump Par- 
liament of Cromwell. Just one more State was 
needed to carry out this patriotic purpose and it was 
found on the map in Nevada, then as now 
a mere mining camp, unequal to the bur- 
dens of Statehood, and later disgraced by 
the sale of Senatorships to bonanza kings 
and a welcome to prize-fighters who had been exiled 
from other law-abiding commonwealths. But the 
glory of Nevada's initial work obscures the infamy 
of these later days and makes us hail her with pride 
as a member of the Union and welcome her warmly 
to the blue field of the flag and the bright constella- 
tion there. 

Lincoln's rank as a popular orator is the highest 
in the annals of American eloquence. His second 
inaugural address and his oration on the battlefield 
of Gettysburg reach the sublimest elevation of hu- 
man speech. He was not the only Northern leader 
who had moral earnestness and eloquence, and the 
spirit of a hero and martyr. Charles Sumner had 
all these in large measure. But Sumner's rhetoric, 



like Edward Everett's, was classic, scholarly and 
pedantic. It had the flavor of the university and 
the library, instead of the odor of the mountains, 
the plains, the market-places and the haunts of the 
humbler sons of the Republic. Lincoln spoke the 
simple language of the poor, without affectation, 
pedantry, classic embellishment, or platitudinous 
ponderosity. And to this divine art of speech he 
owed the opportunity of his life. It enabled him to 
win verdicts from the jury in a time when he was 
an acknowledged leader of the bar of his State ; for 
he represented the Illinois Central Railway, and 
had cases on the calendar in almost every county, 
riding around the circuit in accordance with the 
practice in his day. It made him bold to cross 
swords in a duel of words with Judge Douglas, the 
most illustrious orator of his age, and win a national 
reputation as a master of debate. 

The following is the concluding paragraph of the 
first inaugural: "I am loath to close. We are not 
enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. 
Though passion may have strained, it must not 
break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of 
memory, stretching from every battlefield and pa- 
triot grave to every living heart and hearthstone 
all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus 
of the Union, when again touched, as surely they 
will be, by the better angels of our nature." 

"The oration at Gettysburg," says Boutwell, 
"ranks with the noblest productions of antiquity, 
with the works of Pericles, of Demosthenes, of 

6 



Cicero; and rivals the finest passages of Grattan, 
Burke or Webster." 

The following is a letter to Mrs. Bixby, of Bos- 
ton: 

Nov. 21, 1864. 

"Dear Madam : — I am shown, in the files of the 
War Department, a statement of the Adjutant- 
General of Massachusetts, that you are the mother 
of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of 
battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any 
words of mine which would attempt to beguile you 
from a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain, 
from tendering to you the consolation that may be 
found in the thanks of the Republic they died to 
save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may as- 
suage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave 
you only the cherished memory of the loved and 
lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to 
have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of free- 
dom. 

"Yours very sincerely and respectfully, 

"ABRAHAM LINCOLN." 

The anecdotes that Lincoln told were mostly 
humorous; and often, from our present standards, 
coarse. He resorted to humor quite philosophically, 
as throwing a bright light on the field of 
vision, illustrating by sharp incongruities the 
pathway of wisdom and discretion. He knew 
its value, too, as a safety-valve to the mind, giving 



relief from the crushing burden of serious reflection 
and distracting meditation. 

The following anecdotes, told by Lincoln, may 
serve as types : 

Three men had persistently bothered him with 
applications for office. They called at the White 
House every day for a week. Finally he told them 
the story of a Sunday School boy who was asked 
to give an account of the Hebrew children in the 
fiery furnace, and got on very well till he reached 
the names of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, 
names that were hard for him to pronounce, when 
he blurted out: "Here come those three infernal 
bores; I wish the devil had them." 

Lincoln wrote as follows to a correspondent who 
had urged a candidate for office on the President: 
"I saw your friend, and, as I haven't much influence 
with the administration, I sent him to Chase, who 
told him to go to the devil ; the fellow came straight 
back to me." 

A brigadier-general and twelve army mules had 
been captured in a rebel raid. Colfax brought the 
sad news to Lincoln, who said : "How unfortunate ! 
I can fill the general's place in five minutes, but 
those mules cost $200 apiece." 

When Lincoln was in the Illinois Legislature he 
was put forward by the Republicans to answer an 
elaborate attack made by the Democratic leader on 
one of his pet measures on the ground that it was 
unconstitutional. "Unconstitutional !" said Lincoln, 
"The gentleman's argument reminds me of a story. 

8 



One of my neighbors down on the Sangamon River 
got up early one morning, and, looking out of the 
window, saw, as he thought, a coon up a tree. He 
called on his son Ben to bring a gun, and taking a 
good aim, asked Ben if he, too, saw the coon in the 
tree. Ben, however, answered the old man and 
said : 'Say, dad, that ain't no coon, that's a stye on 
your eyelid.' " 

The real grandeur of Lincoln's character was in 
his moral earnestness and entire devotion to duty. 
He had the heart of a child, and was continually 
impairing the efficiency of the army by reprieves 
and pardons, wrung from him by the tears and 
prayers of the mothers, wives, and sweethearts of 
soldiers who had incurred military discipline. The 
colored people idolized him and called their children 
by his name. 

To-night we celebrate the incomparable services 
and resplendent patriotism of Abraham Lincoln. A 
mass of myth is fast obscuring the true and simple 
story of what he did. Popular legend, rilling in the 
gaps of history, has told of his frontier life and of 
his ups and downs as a flat-boatman and rail-split- 
ter. Partisan zeal discovered and exhibited the 
very rails that he is said to have split ; but the true 
muse of history finds his own assertion that he 
never split a rail in his life. 

John Conness, United States Senator from Cali- 
fornia from 1863-69, and who died in Boston last 
month, writes in the North American Review as 
follows: 



"Mr. Lincoln told the writer that he never split 
a rail, and he described his confusion when, after 
his nomination for President, the people came to 
congratulate him, bringing on their shoulders the 
rails he had split. What should he do about it ? It 
was not true, and his impulse was then and there to 
correct it; but here were masses of men, taking 
their own means of expressing their joy at the event 
of his nomination. Should he dampen the ardor of 
his supporters on the threshold of a campaign, or 
let it go on, and treat it as a means or incident in 
our elections? He concluded to let it pass. The 
loose tradition has now passed into the realm of 
accepted facts." 

Lincoln was a son of the common people. His 
origin was humble, his fortune was long in coming, 
his poverty was sharp, and his schooling was limited 
to twelve months. No family was ennobled by his 
achievements; no university was honored by his 
record of glory; no church, with narrow walls and 
narrower creed, claims him in the fellowship of her 
blind votaries. His human frailties are forgotten 
in the memory of his martrydom; and to-night we 
gladly rehearse those heroic myths that do no harm, 
but only prompt us to seize great virtues and hold 
them fast in flesh and blood where all the young and 
old can see and hear and think and then go out to 
do great deeds. 

The transcendent genius of Lincoln, while the 
gift of God, was developed by the activities of his 
unique career, and displayed in scenes that can 

10 



never be re-enacted in human history. A child of 
poverty, he reached the highest station among the 
sons of men. Without the culture of the schools, 
he found his best equipment for the most arduous 
of labors in the discipline of experience. His fame 
is imperishable while liberty lasts, and the story of 
his life is the most glorious page in the annals of 
the Republic. 



ii 



EAGLE PRESS, BROOKLYN-NEW YORK 



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